Wind Industry Just Hot Air? The Green Skeptic on FOX Business

On Tuesday I sat down with Stuart Varney & Company on FOX Business to talk about wind power and the relative merits of distributed generation versus big wind farms, including the need for transmission and grid infrastructure improvements to make big wind viable.

Scott Edward Andersonis currently global marketing director for cleantech at Ernst & Young. He is the founder of the popular blog, The Green Skeptic, and the VerdeStrategy consultancy. He has held management positions with Ashoka and The Nature Conservancy and is co-founder of the Cleantech Alliance Mid-Atlantic. An award-winning poet, Scott was a John Sawhill Conservation Leadership Fellow, ...

Oh well, hi Willem Post. Not that I believe anything you say. Did you know that as a part of the Desertec Program in Morocco, Suimens is putting up 7.500 big wind turbines- rated at 6 MWh each, in an ampty coastline area with constant wind conditions. Hm, that add´s another 45.000 MWh of fairly constant Atlantic wind power to the European grid, does it not

Goodness, the Association of SW African states, just ibnked a deal through a friend of mine, with G.E. and Lockheed, to put up 24.700 wind turbines in their eleven coutnries. The deal is inked and going down, with excellent forward financing.

This is a website sponsored by Siemens which is a major player in the build out of U.S. wind. You behave ike an energy troll with your anti-wind diatribes charging at the windmills more obsewssively compulsively than Don Quixote on his old mare.

Your pro-nuclear stance ingnores the high costs of readioyactive wate storage. While there are some emerging technologies in radioa ctive waste remediation, they are not yet fully ripe.

While the conservative Cameron government in G.B. is backing off of wind by 10%, Scandinavia, Holland, and Germany are busilly building it out. Ofrfshore is a learning process. Siemens just solved a lot of problems in transmitting offshore power from a new 3.5 GWh North Sea offshore system- near the German island of helgoland, five times further out in the North Sea than ever before. However, wind is consdtant on the North Sea and it will generate a farily constant 3.5 GWh of power going to the German mainland.

When you include the price of backup power in wind, you ignore facts like the sturff is, for the most part, already installed, and just needs upgrading.

VW and Siemens are teaming up togeteher to take advantage of the German renewable energy law in another way, together with onshore-offshore WIND utility "LIchtblick" which provides energy to Hamburg, Bremen, and Lower Sayony. How does the "lichblick" backup syastem work.

The building owner pays a five thousand down lease, and VW Lichtblick come in, tear out the old heating unit, and install an "aqueous fuel aided" gas driven VW engine- driving a Siemens A +++ generator- at just above idling speeds. Then, the exhaust heat goes over aan alpha Stirling motor driving another 10 KWh generator- before going into the heat exhanger. The new designed system will use two different kinds of aqueous fuel systems- with on site electro-catalytic deminieralisation- i.e. less than 1ß0% natural gas- 90% aqueous combustion enhancement. The building owner gets reuced power rates, and LICHTblick gets to instalol 20 KWH of aqueous fuel powered Baseline backup energy at less than 1 Euroe per producing watt. i.e. less than 1000 Euros pere producing backup kilowatt. Your figure of 5000 U.S.d. is thus way off base. 'The sytem is rapidly self amortizing as it is 90% aqueous.

Orf course, Germany is also engaged ina public parallel bank forward financed build out of septic tank sludge, cellulose wastes, cow manure, pig manure, or poulty ropping manure methane recapture systems. Rmember, methane has a greenhouse gas heating value 25 times higher than co², so it makes sense to capture it and use it for farmhouse heat and power and export it into the grid.

Soon, Germany will be taking a part of its eco tax and leveraging that through parallel public banks for a fuirther build out of its sustainability technologies. That will also include the build out of all farm biä-gas potentials. Here, you can estimate approximately 100.0ß00 Euroes per forasm for a bio gas system - runhning a feuel cell producing apprx. 100 KWh on the average. The price per installation is not five thousand U.S.D. per producing kilowatt as you suggest, but rather only - 1000 per producing kilowatt, or 1 Euro per producing wat, which is more than "grid parity thank you." We cut the problem of rural region methane emissions by converting it to heat and power for farm regions.

Agrarian regions fitted with that, solar heat, gorund heat, solar p.v. and wind - genearally gnerate 2.5 times more power than the<y consume- feeding into the grid, or using hydrogen buffering for boosting p.g. on the fuel cells for a fairly constant power supply.

EE and RE sustainability is now the biggest sector in the German economy- and will grow to 20% by 2020. Your figures are way off base Willem Post.

You communications to this Semens spoonsored site never tire of telling the world how you think Germany is going to suffer fro getting off nuclear and approaching a broad synergy of sustainability technologies.

I just read the reports from State owned German rail for the 1st half year of 2012. Fantastic results. Profitable for the "owners" indeed. In the future, German rail will be getting its powe from solar, concentrated solar from spain and North Africa, local wind, offshore wind, aqueous aided SWARM installations such as we see with the Lichtblick system (building out rtoo 1 million units, that Lichtblick system will provide how much power.. a full 40 GW in "aqueous fuel power", plus heat for the buildings. Fancy that.

Siemens just picked up a U.S. solr p.v. compoany which has aan efficiency of 33.9%. We add soemthing else to it, and the efficiency is booastexd to 43.9%- near maxium.

Wind is feasible in both on and offshore where the wind conditions are steady and regular enough, say in the Texas Panhandle, western Missouri, kansas. Simeens has a blade manfufcturing facility in in Fort Madison, western Mo. which gives jobs to over 4 hundred people. That is neat, don´t you think. Wind is a mjor economic factor in wind rich states like texas, kasas, Missouri. I don´t think the four hundred people who work at the Siemens blade manufacturing facility would agree with your false assessments either.

Yoou got your figures all wrong as usual, Mr. Post. 5000 per kilowatt for wind installation plus back up power is way off base.

In all of your pro-nucldear diatribes against renewable, you always avoid the problem of the costs of rasdioactive waste disposal. That never figures iin asny of your distorted calculations. That is the reason why Germany decided to exit nuclear.

have a nice day.

Really, you must not forget that Germany is also a democracy, and the nuclear exit is carried by all of the political parties here, across the board. CDU/CSU, FDP,SPD, Greens, and "The Pirate Party". Nobody wants it and we are figuring out ways of cost effectively replacing it, thank you.

The Munich region is doing quite well, and has an unemployment rate of less than 3%, much due to the sustainability industry also represented by Siemens.

Why don´t you try personally adressing your rants to Peter Loescher CEO of Siemens or the CEO of Siemens Energy - and see what kind of a response you don´t get. This is a Siemens site, but it may dawn on you that the company is just ignoring your rants. "Don Quixote is off tilting at wind mills again". That is the consensus here in Munich about you Mr. Post. Keep it up if you want to do so.

Oh well, hi Willem Post. Not that I believe anything you say. Did you know that as a part of the Desertec Program in Morocco, Suimens is putting up 7.500 big wind turbines- rated at 6 MWh each, in an ampty coastline area with constant wind conditions. Hm, that add´s another 45.000 MWh of fairly constant Atlantic wind power to the European grid, does it not

Goodness, the Association of SW African states, just ibnked a deal through a friend of mine, with G.E. and Lockheed, to put up 24.700 wind turbines in their eleven coutnries. The deal is inked and going down, with excellent forward financing.

This is a website sponsored by Siemens which is a major player in the build out of U.S. wind. You behave ike an energy troll with your anti-wind diatribes charging at the windmills more obsewssively compulsively than Don Quixote on his old mare.

Your pro-nuclear stance ingnores the high costs of readioyactive wate storage. While there are some emerging technologies in radioa ctive waste remediation, they are not yet fully ripe.

While the conservative Cameron government in G.B. is backing off of wind by 10%, Scandinavia, Holland, and Germany are busilly building it out. Ofrfshore is a learning process. Siemens just solved a lot of problems in transmitting offshore power from a new 3.5 GWh North Sea offshore system- near the German island of helgoland, five times further out in the North Sea than ever before. However, wind is consdtant on the North Sea and it will generate a farily constant 3.5 GWh of power going to the German mainland.

When you include the price of backup power in wind, you ignore facts like the sturff is, for the most part, already installed, and just needs upgrading.

VW and Siemens are teaming up togeteher to take advantage of the German renewable energy law in another way, together with onshore-offshore WIND utility "LIchtblick" which provides energy to Hamburg, Bremen, and Lower Sayony. How does the "lichblick" backup syastem work.

The building owner pays a five thousand down lease, and VW Lichtblick come in, tear out the old heating unit, and install an "aqueous fuel aided" gas driven VW engine- driving a Siemens A +++ generator- at just above idling speeds. Then, the exhaust heat goes over aan alpha Stirling motor driving another 10 KWh generator- before going into the heat exhanger. The new designed system will use two different kinds of aqueous fuel systems- with on site electro-catalytic deminieralisation- i.e. less than 1ß0% natural gas- 90% aqueous combustion enhancement. The building owner gets reuced power rates, and LICHTblick gets to instalol 20 KWH of aqueous fuel powered Baseline backup energy at less than 1 Euroe per producing watt. i.e. less than 1000 Euros pere producing backup kilowatt. Your figure of 5000 U.S.d. is thus way off base. 'The sytem is rapidly self amortizing as it is 90% aqueous.

Orf course, Germany is also engaged ina public parallel bank forward financed build out of septic tank sludge, cellulose wastes, cow manure, pig manure, or poulty ropping manure methane recapture systems. Rmember, methane has a greenhouse gas heating value 25 times higher than co², so it makes sense to capture it and use it for farmhouse heat and power and export it into the grid.

Soon, Germany will be taking a part of its eco tax and leveraging that through parallel public banks for a fuirther build out of its sustainability technologies. That will also include the build out of all farm biä-gas potentials. Here, you can estimate approximately 100.0ß00 Euroes per forasm for a bio gas system - runhning a feuel cell producing apprx. 100 KWh on the average. The price per installation is not five thousand U.S.D. per producing kilowatt as you suggest, but rather only - 1000 per producing kilowatt, or 1 Euro per producing wat, which is more than "grid parity thank you." We cut the problem of rural region methane emissions by converting it to heat and power for farm regions.

Agrarian regions fitted with that, solar heat, gorund heat, solar p.v. and wind - genearally gnerate 2.5 times more power than the<y consume- feeding into the grid, or using hydrogen buffering for boosting p.g. on the fuel cells for a fairly constant power supply.

EE and RE sustainability is now the biggest sector in the German economy- and will grow to 20% by 2020. Your figures are way off base Willem Post.

You communications to this Semens spoonsored site never tire of telling the world how you think Germany is going to suffer fro getting off nuclear and approaching a broad synergy of sustainability technologies.

I just read the reports from State owned German rail for the 1st half year of 2012. Fantastic results. Profitable for the "owners" indeed. In the future, German rail will be getting its powe from solar, concentrated solar from spain and North Africa, local wind, offshore wind, aqueous aided SWARM installations such as we see with the Lichtblick system (building out rtoo 1 million units, that Lichtblick system will provide how much power.. a full 40 GW in "aqueous fuel power", plus heat for the buildings. Fancy that.

Siemens just picked up a U.S. solr p.v. compoany which has aan efficiency of 33.9%. We add soemthing else to it, and the efficiency is booastexd to 43.9%- near maxium.

Wind is feasible in both on and offshore where the wind conditions are steady and regular enough, say in the Texas Panhandle, western Missouri, kansas. Simeens has a blade manfufcturing facility in in Fort Madison, western Mo. which gives jobs to over 4 hundred people. That is neat, don´t you think. Wind is a mjor economic factor in wind rich states like texas, kasas, Missouri. I don´t think the four hundred people who work at the Siemens blade manufacturing facility would agree with your false assessments either.

Yoou got your figures all wrong as usual, Mr. Post. 5000 per kilowatt for wind installation plus back up power is way off base.

In all of your pro-nucldear diatribes against renewable, you always avoid the problem of the costs of rasdioactive waste disposal. That never figures iin asny of your distorted calculations. That is the reason why Germany decided to exit nuclear.

have a nice day.

Really, you must not forget that Germany is also a democracy, and the nuclear exit is carried by all of the political parties here, across the board. CDU/CSU, FDP,SPD, Greens, and "The Pirate Party". Nobody wants it and we are figuring out ways of cost effectively replacing it, thank you.

The Munich region is doing quite well, and has an unemployment rate of less than 3%, much due to the sustainability industry also represented by Siemens.

Why don´t you try personally adressing your rants to Peter Loescher CEO of Siemens or the CEO of Siemens Energy - and see what kind of a response you don´t get. This is a Siemens site, but it may dawn on you that the company is just ignoring your rants. "Don Quixote is off tilting at wind mills again". That is the consensus here in Munich about you Mr. Post. Keep it up if you want to do so.

Oh well, hi Willem Post. Not that I believe anything you say. Did you know that as a part of the Desertec Program in Morocco, Suimens is putting up 7.500 big wind turbines- rated at 6 MWh each, in an ampty coastline area with constant wind conditions. Hm, that add´s another 45.000 MWh of fairly constant Atlantic wind power to the European grid, does it not

Goodness, the Association of SW African states, just ibnked a deal through a friend of mine, with G.E. and Lockheed, to put up 24.700 wind turbines in their eleven coutnries. The deal is inked and going down, with excellent forward financing.

This is a website sponsored by Siemens which is a major player in the build out of U.S. wind. You behave ike an energy troll with your anti-wind diatribes charging at the windmills more obsewssively compulsively than Don Quixote on his old mare.

Your pro-nuclear stance ingnores the high costs of readioyactive wate storage. While there are some emerging technologies in radioa ctive waste remediation, they are not yet fully ripe.

While the conservative Cameron government in G.B. is backing off of wind by 10%, Scandinavia, Holland, and Germany are busilly building it out. Ofrfshore is a learning process. Siemens just solved a lot of problems in transmitting offshore power from a new 3.5 GWh North Sea offshore system- near the German island of helgoland, five times further out in the North Sea than ever before. However, wind is consdtant on the North Sea and it will generate a farily constant 3.5 GWh of power going to the German mainland.

When you include the price of backup power in wind, you ignore facts like the sturff is, for the most part, already installed, and just needs upgrading.

VW and Siemens are teaming up togeteher to take advantage of the German renewable energy law in another way, together with onshore-offshore WIND utility "LIchtblick" which provides energy to Hamburg, Bremen, and Lower Sayony. How does the "lichblick" backup syastem work.

The building owner pays a five thousand down lease, and VW Lichtblick come in, tear out the old heating unit, and install an "aqueous fuel aided" gas driven VW engine- driving a Siemens A +++ generator- at just above idling speeds. Then, the exhaust heat goes over aan alpha Stirling motor driving another 10 KWh generator- before going into the heat exhanger. The new designed system will use two different kinds of aqueous fuel systems- with on site electro-catalytic deminieralisation- i.e. less than 1ß0% natural gas- 90% aqueous combustion enhancement. The building owner gets reuced power rates, and LICHTblick gets to instalol 20 KWH of aqueous fuel powered Baseline backup energy at less than 1 Euroe per producing watt. i.e. less than 1000 Euros pere producing backup kilowatt. Your figure of 5000 U.S.d. is thus way off base. 'The sytem is rapidly self amortizing as it is 90% aqueous.

Orf course, Germany is also engaged ina public parallel bank forward financed build out of septic tank sludge, cellulose wastes, cow manure, pig manure, or poulty ropping manure methane recapture systems. Rmember, methane has a greenhouse gas heating value 25 times higher than co², so it makes sense to capture it and use it for farmhouse heat and power and export it into the grid.

Soon, Germany will be taking a part of its eco tax and leveraging that through parallel public banks for a fuirther build out of its sustainability technologies. That will also include the build out of all farm biä-gas potentials. Here, you can estimate approximately 100.0ß00 Euroes per forasm for a bio gas system - runhning a feuel cell producing apprx. 100 KWh on the average. The price per installation is not five thousand U.S.D. per producing kilowatt as you suggest, but rather only - 1000 per producing kilowatt, or 1 Euro per producing wat, which is more than "grid parity thank you." We cut the problem of rural region methane emissions by converting it to heat and power for farm regions.

Agrarian regions fitted with that, solar heat, gorund heat, solar p.v. and wind - genearally gnerate 2.5 times more power than the<y consume- feeding into the grid, or using hydrogen buffering for boosting p.g. on the fuel cells for a fairly constant power supply.

EE and RE sustainability is now the biggest sector in the German economy- and will grow to 20% by 2020. Your figures are way off base Willem Post.

You communications to this Semens spoonsored site never tire of telling the world how you think Germany is going to suffer fro getting off nuclear and approaching a broad synergy of sustainability technologies.

I just read the reports from State owned German rail for the 1st half year of 2012. Fantastic results. Profitable for the "owners" indeed. In the future, German rail will be getting its powe from solar, concentrated solar from spain and North Africa, local wind, offshore wind, aqueous aided SWARM installations such as we see with the Lichtblick system (building out rtoo 1 million units, that Lichtblick system will provide how much power.. a full 40 GW in "aqueous fuel power", plus heat for the buildings. Fancy that.

Siemens just picked up a U.S. solr p.v. compoany which has aan efficiency of 33.9%. We add soemthing else to it, and the efficiency is booastexd to 43.9%- near maxium.

Wind is feasible in both on and offshore where the wind conditions are steady and regular enough, say in the Texas Panhandle, western Missouri, kansas. Simeens has a blade manfufcturing facility in in Fort Madison, western Mo. which gives jobs to over 4 hundred people. That is neat, don´t you think. Wind is a mjor economic factor in wind rich states like texas, kasas, Missouri. I don´t think the four hundred people who work at the Siemens blade manufacturing facility would agree with your false assessments either.

Yoou got your figures all wrong as usual, Mr. Post. 5000 per kilowatt for wind installation plus back up power is way off base.

In all of your pro-nucldear diatribes against renewable, you always avoid the problem of the costs of rasdioactive waste disposal. That never figures iin asny of your distorted calculations. That is the reason why Germany decided to exit nuclear.

have a nice day.

Really, you must not forget that Germany is also a democracy, and the nuclear exit is carried by all of the political parties here, across the board. CDU/CSU, FDP,SPD, Greens, and "The Pirate Party". Nobody wants it and we are figuring out ways of cost effectively replacing it, thank you.

The Munich region is doing quite well, and has an unemployment rate of less than 3%, much due to the sustainability industry also represented by Siemens.

Why don´t you try personally adressing your rants to Peter Loescher CEO of Siemens or the CEO of Siemens Energy - and see what kind of a response you don´t get. This is a Siemens site, but it may dawn on you that the company is just ignoring your rants. "Don Quixote is off tilting at wind mills again". That is the consensus here in Munich about you Mr. Post. Keep it up if you want to do so.

I just saw your interview on FOX. It was rough. Too bad, they gave you so little time. The fellow who led the interview was way out of his depth. I wish I had been there. Here are a few items for your info.

Wind energy requires quick-ramping gas turbines that ramp up when wind energy ebbs and ramp down when wind energy surges. This happens a few hundred times per day.

Wind energy cannot be stored.

Interconnecting hundreds of wind turbine facilities in the Great Plains and sending the energy a few thousand miles to the East Coast is a highly visible monstrosity, enormously expensive, and has much energy losses; at least 10%. The transmission system would be under-utilized (low capacity factor of about 30% vs normal about 60%). Hence, some National Renewables Energy Lab and academic folks say: Just build about 20 to 30 percent more wind turbines to keep the lines loaded. Wow! I am NOT making this up.

The idea that by interconnection there will always be wind energy from somewhere is a gigantic fabrication by academics not supported by weather data. If so, what will be the sustainable level of wind energy; 20% of normal, 30% of normal? Such thinking is beyond rational.

Offshore costs are about 2 times more captal intensive/kW, PLUS interconnection under water, PLUS connection to shore, PLUS transmission to where the energy is needed, in case of Germany, from the Baltic and the North Seas to South Germany. There is uproar in Germany regarding the visibles and the cost. Politicians are scrambling, may rethink NOT closing the remaining nuclear plants.

The capital cost of offshore wind turbine facilities is about $4,000/kW or greater, plus capital costs for transmission systems to connect the offshore facilities to land-based grids.

Even with the US government giving 30% of the project capital cost as cash and the various states making other cash gifts, the cost of offshore energy would be about 15c to 20c per kWh delivered to the land-based grids. This compares with an annual average grid price of about 5.5c to 6c per kWh.

NRG has realized these gifts will not be forthcoming and its tax-shelter Blue Water Offshore project has collapsed under its own weight; good riddance. Cape Wind is another white elephant whose outcome will be the same.

Analyses of offshore energy by Denmark and the Netherlands came to the same conclusion, even without the "benefits" of tax-sheltering.

The below articles contain studies of 4 grids (Texas, Colorado, Ireland and the Netherlands), based on MEASURED data, that show wind energy does not reduce CO2 anywhere near what promotors are claiming.